Physicist Kevin Knuth on the Tic Tac's accelerations: Ross Coulthart (NewsNation Reality Check, 2026)

0:00 G'day and welcome back to Reality Check. I'm your host Ross Coulthard and today I'm very excited to welcome someone who's become a friend and somebody I respect enormously in the UAP research sphere, Professor Kevin Knuth. Professor Kevin Knuth is a physicist and professor of physics at the University of Albany in New York. He's a leading figure in applying rigorous scientific method to unidentified anomalous phenomena. He worked for several years with NASA at the Ames Research Centre. His interest in UAPs dates back to his time at Montana State University in the late 80s where he became interested in cattle mutilations that were ongoing at that time and they were going on near the 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base UFO incident and he's obviously spoken to our friend researcher Robert Hastings

1:00 about that. Kevin's long argued that UAP deserve serious, stigma-free, scientifically rigorous study rather than dismissal as pseudoscience. He's one of the groundbreakers, one of the mavericks who's taken this subject on. His most memorable and probably most cited UAP work is the 2019 peer-reviewed paper, peer-reviewed, I emphasis in the journal Entropy, entitled Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles which he co-authored with Robert Powell and Peter Riali. It analysed historic cases with particular focus on the 2004 USS Nimitz Tic Tac case. It estimated extreme accelerations, often a hundred G to thousands of G, hypersonic velocities without sonic booms, significant heat signature with lacking

2:01 significant heat signatures and other performance characteristics inconsistent with known human technology. Kevin's the vice president of UAPX, which is now part of Albany University, and he's participated in expeditions and co-authored papers on initial scientific results from the UAPX field expeditions. He's also a research affiliate with the Galileo Project and he contributes, of course, to the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. And most recently, he was announced as a member of the government's UAP Science Advisory Council under Avi Lowe. Kevin, welcome. Gosh! I'm halfway through the hour and I've only just listed your attributes and your achievements. We're going, "No!" Oh my gosh. Well, thank you for the very kind introduction. Let's go to your childhood. Did you have anomalous phenomena when you were a kid? I have had a couple of incidents when I was a kid that were anomalous.

3:03 And one of the first ones I remember was I was about six years old and my father was a wildlife artist and we would spend time birdwatching. And I grew up in Wisconsin, so we had gone out to a place called Mullet Creek, which is east of Pond du Lac, my hometown. And we were driving back home and this was way back before people wore seat belts and when you had a nice bench seat instead of the bucket seats. And so, my dad was driving and I'm a passenger in the front seat and I had this very strong feeling that I needed to move over close to my dad. So, an intuition. It was an intuition. It's just sense I have to move over to my dad. So, I scooted over on the bench seat next to my dad and I remember putting my head on his shoulder. And in the moment my head touched his shoulder, the car door, my car door on my side, the passenger side blew open. Blew open? It actually blew open and my dad pulled the car over and closed the door and was quite rattled by the whole situation and he...

4:05 How does a door blow open on a train of car? I have no idea how it happened, but it just did. It just opened by itself and my dad was very freaked out about the whole thing. And then he asked me, he said, "Why did you move over to sit right next to me?" And I said, "I just felt I had to." And I think he was also freaked out by my response. So... I don't want to embarrass you and get you to go into the detail, but did your father have similar intuitions? Yeah, I found out later my father did sometimes have similar intuitions, yes. And do you think it's genetic? I mean, have you looked at that issue of a possible genetic link? It's possible that it could be. I'm not sure. I don't know how you test for these things. So that's difficult. That's the issue. Yes. And this is an area of science where you don't know how you can test for these things. Right. Are we confounded when we investigate phenomena like this that there is no way of empirically measuring it? Right. Or should there always be a way of measuring and testing?

5:05 That's a good question. I mean, if you can detect it, I would imagine that you should be able to sense it in some way, in an empirical way. I think, you know, part of the other problem is I don't think people are honest with other people or even or open with other people or even themselves when these things happen to people. So it's not clear. It wouldn't be clear to me how common it would have been to, you know, I never heard of my mother having anything like this, but maybe she never talked about it. Before we get back to it, I want to talk to you about something a little bit different from what we normally cover on this show. Not a mystery, just a headache. A lot of you probably have to deal with every week running a business. If you've ever tried to grow something, a shop, a practice, a small company, you know, the problem isn't usually the big idea. It's the plumbing. Ten different tools that don't talk to each other. Data entered twice. Nobody's quite sure

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7:08 Yeah. Probably the most striking one was it occurred in a house we rented when I lived in, we lived in Albany. We now live south of Albany. And it was very late at night. I'll give you all the caveats, right? Because I worry about all this as a scientist, you know, what really happened. So it was very late at night. It was about 2:00 a.m. And I'm going to bed. I'm tired. So I'm tired and sleepy and I'm going from a brightly lit living room to a dark hallway. And I could see well enough in the hallway. And my son was about a year and a half at the time and old enough that we had lowered his crib so that he could get out and we took the side off the crib. But then, of course, you worry about him hurting himself in the middle of the night. We lived on the second floor. So we put up a little rail, a little fence, you know, those little fences you set up by the door. So that had been set up. And my son would be very often, he would come down the hall and just find him

8:08 standing there at the door and like, whoa, what are you doing? He would usually startle you. Oh, what are you doing up? Is everything all right? So I'm coming down the hallway and I see a boy standing at the fence. And I'm like, oh, like, Henry, what are you doing up? And he doesn't respond. He's just at the fence standing there. So I go walking up to the door and I'm literally, you know, hallway distracted. You know, hallway distance away from him. So I'm three and a half, four feet away. And, and I can, it does not look like my son. It's, it's not a, it's not a one and a half year old boy who he's usually holding the gate like this, just barely peeing over to peep over it. This kid's got their, their hands down here. Maybe about, looks like about a five year old boy. Is it a, is it a translucent object? No, he was properly lit. He was properly lit is properly shadowed. It was a boy, just a boy standing at the gate. It looked like a physical human being. A physical boy at the gate. And I, and I was still in shock from the whole thing, trying to piece this together.

9:10 And I was like, I remember, I think I backed into the wall cause I was scared by the whole strangeness of it. And I remember I had my arms crossed and I was like, Henry, is everything okay? Henry, is that you? And when I said, is that you? He, he turned to look at me. He was holding on the gate and he was, um, he was looking to the side. He turned to look at me and he looked scared. I think which scared me even more. Right. Cause now he, and he looked scared and he, and he very slowly, it was a strange motion. And I, you very slowly, uh, opened up his fingers like this, let go of the gate. And without moving his hands, he just backed into the shadows of the room. And, and I was like, oh my God, that is not my son. Right. It was not my son. And I was scared by that. And then, but then the parent kicks in. Right. There is a stranger in my kid's room and I will deal with this. And I did.

10:10 I ran, I ran at the gate and I literally jumped over it, ready to grab this five-year-old boy, whoever it was. And I land in the room and there's, and there's nobody there. And, um. So he disappeared from side. I didn't see him. And I, so I'm looking around the room. The first thing I do is go check on my son. He's asleep in bed and he's fine. And I checking the room. I check under the bed. I check in the closet. I'm checking on top of the dresser. I mean, I mean, the kid's gone, right? Nobody's there. And then I'm like, all right, Kevin, it is 2:00 AM. It is, you are half asleep. You need to get your butt in bed. And cause you are probably just hallucinating. Isn't that funny though? It often happens. People have those weird experiences. Yeah. And the first thing they feel like doing is just going and resting. I mean, I find that. That happens a lot. Yes. I've noticed that. Why wouldn't you be so hyped up with adrenaline after something like that? Yeah, no. I need to get into bed. I'm tired and that's, I'm done. Yeah. I mean, that's weird, isn't it? It is a weird thing. You're absolutely right.

11:10 Yeah. Well, with that, to finish that incident, I left the room and I went next door to the bathroom to brush my teeth and I'm brushing my teeth and my son wakes up and he shouts, mommy, daddy, help, help. So I go running back into the room and my son is upset because he saw a boy in the room. Wow. And I was like, did he hurt you? And I'm like, no. Well, why are you upset? He goes, I don't know. He scared me. Okay. And what was the boy doing? Just standing. Where was he standing? By the door. Which is where I saw him standing. True. And I said, where'd he go? He goes, I don't know. He was there. And then he wasn't there. Wow. And it's coming from a one and a half year old. What did your wife say? I think she was pretty freaked out by the whole thing. I actually, I asked him if he needed someone to sleep with him that night. And he wanted me to sleep in there. So I grabbed me and an air mattress blown up in the guest room. So I grabbed that and brought it in and laid it down, laid down next to him.

12:10 And his crib wall was off. So I laid down next to him. I'm rubbing his back and he's falling asleep and he's getting all drowsy-eyed. And then all of a sudden froze his brow and his eyes get big. He goes, oh, there he is, daddy. He's right behind you. And I roll over and there's nobody there. Oh my God. There's no one there. And I roll back and like, Henry, I don't see anybody. And he said, I don't know, daddy. He was there. And then he wasn't there. I was like, that's it. I'm done. I picked him up. I said, we're going to sleep in our bed tonight. And I took him across the hall to our bed in our bedroom. And I put him in a bed and my wife stirs a bit. And she goes, what? Why are you coming in here with Henry? And I said, he's sleeping in here with us tonight. And I don't want to talk about it till the morning. And that was that. And then the next morning she had gotten up before I did with Henry. And she asked him about it. And he told her the story first. And then she heard it from me. Was that introduction for you to the whole idea that there are things that are anomalous that we can't explain?

13:10 That was the first real introduction into anything like that. And it was very hard. It was easy when I saw him because I just assumed it was a hallucination. I thought, I'm just dreaming or something. Put your science brain on. Right. What was that? I have no idea what it was. I honestly don't. Are you a mini-meal? Yeah. It was funny because when I interviewed recently with Mayim Bialik and she asked me if I am comfortable telling people I saw a ghost. And I don't know what a ghost is. I don't know what a ghost is. So I don't know if it was a ghost. I can only tell you what I saw. You're right. But the important thing is your witness evidence is evidence, isn't it? Because one of the things that I've often been struck by is a lot of people who call themselves scientists say that witness evidence is not

14:11 evidence. Right. But by definition, if somebody says they've seen something or had an experience, that experience can't be discounted, can it? No. Not entirely. Yeah. Absolutely. So you were at Montana State University in a really interesting period of history when right across the Midwest of America, and Linda Moulton Howe was preeminent in describing this. Right. There were these weird cattle mutilations that were occurring. I think in some cases over a period of years there were 10,000 such cases. They were investigated by the FBI and really there was never a determination as to who or what was responsible. What did you find with the cattle mutilations? Well, it was my, I grew up in Wisconsin and I went to graduate school in Montana. And I was in Bozeman and it was probably our second week in classes there. So I'd just moved there and it was, so this

15:12 would have been late August of 1988. And there had been, got up in the morning, go to school and turned on the news and the morning news, they were talking about these two cattle mutilations that had occurred on a single ranch where they were surgically manipulated or whatever. I don't know what a good word he is. What characterizes, let's be careful about this. What characterizes the oddity of these cattle mutilations? It's not just an animal that's being cut out. No, it was very weird. And in fact, looking back and knowing more about them now, it was classic. They had, their sex organs were removed. Their eyes were removed. The jaw was resected. And I think the tongue was probably removed. And in some cases that I've seen in Australia. Years as well. It's a level of surgical precision. It was surgical precision. Yeah. With the removal of flesh completely off the bone. Right. Exactly. And I remember arguing, and so we were arguing later in the physics department

16:14 about this. The students who had just moved there were all, we were all kind of freaked out by this. This is not normal. And so, and we were arguing about this. I remember saying, because the news was basically saying it was either Satanists or aliens. Because there had been a lot of UFO sightings then. So with the news people, it was Satanists or aliens. And I remember saying, I don't know how a Satanist would do it. And I don't know why an alien would do it. I would remember I was, that's one of the things I said in the argument. So there was never any explanation for them, was there? No, no. And we've had the same thing in Australia. I was talking to a couple who had one probably three or four months ago in northern Queensland. Oh wow. And it's never fully explained. Right. All over the world, these weird incidents where animals are completely exsanguinated. Was that the case with yours? There was absolutely no... I don't remember if it was exsanguinated. I don't remember if that was the case in that one. Did you go to investigate these mutilations at all? No, I didn't. Yeah. I was a physics grad student and I was busy at school.

17:14 Okay. So was that, I guess, an early seed for your interest in using physics to investigate anomalous phenomena? Yeah, it was a seed for me to think about UFOs seriously because we were, when we were very actively discussing this in the hallway, we disturbed a professor down the hall. And he came to find out what we were talking about. And in the course of his discussion with us, he said, "Yeah, that's all very strange, but you know what's really strange is I have friends who are in the Air Force up at Malmstrom Air Force Base, and they have problems with UFOs coming over the nuclear weapons sites and shutting down the ICBMs." And at the time we thought that was funny, you know, because that's hard to believe that the entire US Air Force wouldn't be on red alert if that would happen, right? Sure. So it was hard to imagine. And yet we now know it was true. And then later when I was a professor at UAlbany around 2015, I had come across the press

18:17 conference that Robert Hastings had held in 2010, where the first speaker was Robert Salas and he was talking about UFO incursions at the nuclear missile sites and Malmstrom Air Force Base, the same Air Force Base in 1967. And I thought, oh my God, this is actually real. It really struck me. It's real and it's been going on for some time because that was 1967. And then I heard about it happening in 1988. So that's 20 years. True. And then just two years ago, my wife is from Louisiana. We were down visiting family for Mardi Gras and I was grilling with her uncle Matt and I noticed he had an Air Force cap on and I knew he'd been in the Air Force. But he had Malmstrom. And I said, you were at Malmstrom. When were you at Malmstrom Air Force Base? He goes, oh, early 70s. And I asked him, I said, if you ever, did you know anything about UFOs incursions at the nuclear weapons sites? He goes, oh, that used to happen all the time. It was nothing. That used to happen all the time.

19:17 Yeah, they fly in and they shut down whole flights of missiles. And I was so excited to hear that I called my wife out because I said, my wife has to hear this because I'm tired of being the only crazy person in the room. I mean, the implications of that, though, Kevin, are incredible. It's always amazed me ever since I first spoke to Robert Salas. I mean, he's telling the truth. Yeah, absolutely. And he's still scarred by the way he was gaslit for telling the story. Right. But essentially the implications are a gigantic red UFO hovers over an ICBM silo and disengages, turns off remotely without any internal action, turns off the entire ten fleet of missiles. Right. How do you do that? That's a good question. I have a hypothesis, a physics hypothesis, because one of the hypotheses we have for UFOs and they're basically moving is has to

20:18 do with they might be warping space sometimes some way because they are accelerating at incredibly high rates that otherwise the inertia would kill everybody inside. True. So if you're warping space time, you're messing with space and time. Right. Now, the missiles are not that far. You know, yeah, they're underground and it's shielded, but the missiles have a navigation system running constantly because they're ready to launch. Right. And so they've got a navigation system running. But if you start messing with space and time, you're going to mess up the navigation system. Right. And the navigation and he had and Salas had actually noted the failure was some kind of navigation system failure. So the navigation system would fail and the missile would shut down. So I don't think they were trying to shut down the missiles. I think it was probably an accident. So is that what you think happens when people describe missing time? That's possible. I don't know what exactly what happens in those cases, but some of that some of that might be explainable that way.

21:19 I've spoken to people who've served in missile silo complexes and one of them said that he'd been taken and he had this weird situation where his vehicle was found in a completely different location from where he last remembered being. And the incredible thing was he was in snow. There were no tracks in, no tracks out. His vehicle had been plopped in the middle of somewhere and he couldn't wake up his colleague beside him. It's an incredible story. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Anyway, moving on. I'm fascinated by the work that you did to do this peer reviewed paper, which appeared in the journal Entropy, which was, I think, a definitive moment in the history of UAP science. I think it'll be remembered. Oh, thank you. Very, very much so. I mean, you described the Tic Tac, 2004 Tic Tac, it dropped from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 of a second. In fact, I cited your paper when I wrote my book, and essentially what you're describing

22:20 there is Gs of possibly as much as 5,400 G, far beyond the F-35 structural limits of what it would be, 15, 16 G at most? I think it's 13 and a half G before their wings rip off. It's pretty amazing, yeah. Basically, the power that you estimated would be necessary to generate that single movement equated to 10 times the entire U.S. nuclear power output at the time. Right. It's mind-blowing. And yet, there was no sonic boom. No. No visible exhaust, no air disturbance, and no observed energy deposition on abrupt stops. Yeah, and as a physicist, that's what bothers me most. Conservation of energy. Yeah, that kinetic energy had to go somewhere, right? Well, there must be heat, surely. And you would usually turn it into heat, and that should have been like an explosion of, I think I calculated, like 250 Tomahawk cruise missiles going off at once is what you should have seen.

23:21 Sure. Yeah, so there's so much that's anomalous about these encounters. And yet, four years after you published that paper, Sean Kirkpatrick, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the then director of the government's UFO investigation office, Arrow, gave evidence before the Senate Armed Services Committee, April 19, 2023. And he said, categorically, Arrow found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics. And then he really went on to dig himself in a hole. I'm going to give you the opportunity to respond to this. He said, only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous or that most unresolved cases lack sufficient data. He said, on the Tic Tac case, I encourage those who hold alternative theories or views to submit your research to credible peer-reviewed

24:24 scientific journals. Arrow is working to do the same. This is how science works, not by blog or social media. And basically, he inferred that there had been no peer-reviewed paper. Yours was, surely, wasn't it? Oh, absolutely. In fact, our group, UAPX, had met with Arrow in, I think it was probably February. So it was a few months, it was like two months before that. So he knew about that paper? And he was informed about the paper. They had a copy of my paper, absolutely. So he willfully, you believe, misled the Congress? That or forgot about our paper, but that's hard to forget. We basically said, I mean, one of the things I pointed out in that paper was that at 1000 G acceleration, which was five times less than what we actually measured, you can get from, you can get to the 90% the speed of light in 17 hours. Wow. And at that acceleration, you can get across

25:25 the galaxy in three months because by that time you're moving at relativistic speed. So relativity kicks in and time slows down for the ship and all this. So we actually say in the paper, not only could this have been an interstellar craft, but it would have been an excellent interstellar craft. And I stand by that. Sure. How sensitive are those estimates of the G estimates? You know, I think you said 5,400 or 5,500 G estimates for the descent from 28,000 feet to the sea surface. You calibrated those to the precise timing resolution of the radar and the assumed mass of the object. How accurate is that? Like how reliable can we be on those? Well, we have error bars set up on those values. So I don't remember exactly what they were, but it was clearly more than 1,000 G's even at the low end. And this would have been a minimum acceleration. Sure. And I just want to labour this point. I think for a lot of our audience, they may not understand the physics behind this. Energy conservation, it's one of the most fundamental principles in physics.

26:26 In any closed system, the amount of energy remains constant. Right. So if something moves that rapidly, one assumes it would generate massive quantities of heat. Especially friction through the air, there should be massive. I mean, almost the air would be on fire. Yeah, exactly. And Commander Fravor, they didn't see anything like that, did they? No, nothing like that. Explain that to a bear with a very simple brain then. How can that be in physics? Are we not looking there at something that completely challenges the known laws of physics? It does challenge the known laws of physics. It's not clear how any craft would do such a thing. A top speed in that manoeuvre would have been about 40,000 miles an hour, which is approximately the speed that the New Horizons probe is now going. The probe that we sent to Pluto in 2015. And so these things are clearly moving at spacecraft speeds through the air without

27:29 sonic booms or fireballs. It's very perplexing. I mean, just to lay to the point, is there any structure or material design that we know of terrestrially that could perhaps design the kind of technology that would be needed to build an object that could survive that kind of acceleration? Oh, not survive the acceleration. We don't have any way to do that. Missiles are designed to be able to withstand a lot of acceleration. So missiles can still manoeuvre under about 35 Gs. But the missile frame is compromised at about 60 Gs. And, you know, we're looking at 100 times more of that. So this is orders of magnitude above what we would be able to make. So, Kevin, what was it? It appears to be highly advanced craft of some kind. Right. One of the things I've been outspoken about is that I've been told by my sources and I chuckled when I saw Matthew Sigides had a thing on his display today saying it wasn't

28:31 Lockheed Martin. I do beg to differ. I do believe Lockheed Martin has possession of this kind of technology and that they may potentially have been operating it. If there was a human operator, they didn't need to be. It's possible that an object like that could be operated remotely, isn't it? We're assuming it might be a UAV technology of some kind. Right. Could it be, as some people have recently speculated, some kind of aerogel? Some kind of aerogel? It would be hard to imagine that even being able to survive accelerations of 5000 Gs. That's a lot. Could it be a projection? Could it be some kind of projection of an image in some way? Some kind of a projection of an image or lasers ionizing the air or something like that. There were hypotheses like these as well. The problem there is that the object interacted with Commander Fravor. And when Commander Fravor changed his maneuvers,

29:33 the object also changed its maneuvers. So if somebody would have had to intelligently be operating that projection, which means they would have also been having to monitor Commander Fravor's behavior and position. But the Navy said there was nobody in the area to be doing that. And they would have known about it. So that rules that out as well. You looked at the JAL 1628 case as well, which is an incredible case. Right. Captain Takuchi, who is flying his cargo aircraft up towards Anchorage. And he sees, what does he see, Kevin Knuth? We saw several UAP actually. I think it starts out, he's approached by two craft, I think, which were rectangular. And these rectangular lights that were like scanning, shining light into the cockpit, scanning it. And that happened for some time. And then he was approached by a large walnut shaped craft. Which was huge apparently. Which he estimated to be four 747s in length.

30:34 Right. So that's the size of an aircraft carrier. Did you get the chance to speak to the captain? No, I've never spoken to him. And that would be very exciting to do so. But one thing we do have, and I hope you were able to get access to the data, is there was radar data obtained by John Callaghan from the Federal Aviation Administration. Right. Which apparently the CIA tried to hide. They tried to hide. I knew they took it. Yeah. But I didn't know that they also tried to hide it. Yeah, they took the tapes. Right. But John Callaghan had the presence of mind to keep a copy. He had copied them and he kept a copy in the box under his desk for several years. Oh, it's ballsy stuff. It really is. But what on earth is the CIA doing? Getting involved in investigating a UFO for heaven's sake. That's a good question. Clearly they're interested in these things when they say they're not. So as you got into this subject matter, does the scientist in you find yourself fighting against that kind of conclusion? I mean, it just seems preposterous that

31:36 governments could want to conceal evidence of awesome technology. Yeah. I find it frustrating as a scientist because my passion that drove me into science in the first place is I wanted to find out what the universe is like. And this is going to be a huge component of this. You know, this suggests that we're possibly not alone on Earth even. So which is significant. It's a significant fact for everybody. But the implications are, I mean, you've reached the conclusion that a paper that was peer reviewed in an eminent journal, contrary to what Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick says, you reached the conclusion that this was potentially some kind of craft, some kind of intelligently controlled object. Right. Which when you wrote that, you must have known the implications of what you were writing. Oh, but I didn't know the implications, but it's pretty obvious from those accelerations and speeds. And in fact, after I had done more research

32:37 into the history after writing that paper and found that Herman Oberth, who was a rocketry pioneer, mentor to Werner Von Braun, had given a talk on UFOs in 1954. And he mentions that their speeds are quite high at 19 kilometers a second, which is about 40,000 miles an hour, which is about the speed that the Tic Tac would have been going halfway through that drop. And so this has been known by, and he said he had seen over 50 radar measurements of this in 1954. So this has been known by some for a good 80 years. And yet there were you 50 years later and you were, until you started looking at it, unaware of it. Yes. I mean, there's been a very effective disinformation operation to keep all this quiet. Do you believe yourself that the government's been hiding this? Oh, they clearly have been hiding it. I mean, we had a NASA report came out, what,

33:39 two years ago now? 11 pages. That's the best they can do. I had talked, personally, I talked to Alan Bean, astronaut Alan Bean from Apollo 12. And he told me about how, when he went up to Skylab, how they had seen a red flashing light actually approach Skylab and then leave. And they had photographs of that. And those photographs can be found online. But, but should NASA have maybe interviewed him or included that information in the report to Congress? Of course they should. I would think so. Yeah. I gave Mike Gold a hard time about that. That's very good. Yes. And he was a good sport, but I mean, it is, it's absurd. That should have been in the report. And, and, and then in the last data release that we had, we had, what, several photos from NASA. From the surface of the moon. One was from Apollo 17 with three lights in the sky. Sure. From Apollo 17. So they sat on that as well. So NASA has been keeping quiet about this as well. And I, I find that hard to accept because I

34:40 am former NASA. I'm part of the NASA family and I'm, I'm insulted by that. I was going to ask in your time at Ames, did you see anything that raised the concern that there was anomalous phenomena that wasn't being revealed? No, I never saw anything like that. And the opinions of my colleagues were usually pretty uniform that UFOs are a joke. So the, the attitude was just that this is silly. Are UFOs a joke, Professor Knutson? They're absolutely, they're incredibly serious. And I think, you know, you can, Ryan Graves, you know, makes the point that this is a flight safety issue. And, and pilots need to know what's in the skies. But now we have another problem because we know that NASA has been keeping this secret. These things have been seen in space too. And now that we have private space companies involved with space travel, that means private citizens are going to run into these things in space. And you're going to have an accident in space.

35:40 This is now a flight safety issue for space as well. I think that's incredibly serious. Let me throw at you though, the arguments that are made. I mean, you mentioned Oberth, the Nazi scientist who was involved in paperclip and then was involved in seeing these mysterious objects on the ranges where they were testing technology in the fifties. Obviously he saw it in 1954. Right. Why have decades of radar data not produced a huge body of peer reviewed kinematic studies that basically proved this is a real phenomenon? I mean, you're one of the first with your peer reviewed paper. Right. That's a good question. I think, I mean, most of the radar data that's collected by the FAA are for commercial flights. And they are, the systems are designed to remove any kind of noise from the radar being displayed to the air traffic controllers. So if you've got a craft barreling by at 10,000 miles an hour, clearly not an airplane.

36:42 You erased it from the data set. It must be noise. So you erase it from that data set being presented to air traffic controllers. So I can imagine, I mean, I know that a lot of those things won't show up on normal radar systems. You and I were talking with your colleague, Matthew Sigurdas, outside just before we're at the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies Conference. And he was talking about how modern cameras, modern microprocessors are now making it easy for citizen scientists to do the work that used to be only be able to be done by government science. Sooner or later, citizen science is going to reveal something dramatic, isn't it? Yeah, of course. Yes. What's UAPX about? What are you trying to do? So UAPX is a scientific project aimed to collect data on UAPs and try to characterize them and understand them. And what sort of data collection systems are you using? Yes. We have multimodal sensor modality, multimodal sensor platform set up.

37:42 We have a particular location in Connecticut that we've been monitoring where there are frequent orb sightings or sphere sightings. And we have multiple cameras set up so that we can perform triangulation. And we have had periods where we'll go out there in person to watch with extra equipment, radiation detectors, spectrometers and things like this. Okay. And so have you been able to triangulate objects? Have you been able to measure the speed of We haven't triangulated things yet. We've had systems out there collecting data for a while now that we're just starting to analyze. The problem is you collecting visual imagery from a video camera for 24 hours non-stop for several months. Somebody's got to watch that. Yeah. And that is not that exciting. Sure. One of the areas I'm really interested in is spectrography where you can look at the, if

38:44 you like, the signature, the frequency of light. Have you done a lot of that work? We haven't done a lot of that yet. I have actually recently just bought a new diffraction grating for our digital SR cameras that we, that we plan to use for that. Are you using different types of radar? We've not used radar yet. So we do have a, we do have a radar system that we plan to deploy in August. What about, one of the things that I'm worried that we overlook is the possibility of signals coming from those objects. Right. Are you measuring for that? We have also recently purchased a spectrum analyzer for the RF ranges, so radio frequency ranges. Are you picking up any stuff? We haven't deployed that yet either. That gets deployed in August as well. One of the things that constantly gets talked about on TV shows like Skinwalker Ranch and other programs is this magical 1.6 gigahertz. 1.6 gigahertz. Right. Have you ever seen any evidence to substantiate

39:45 that? No, I have not seen that, but our, we made sure that our, our spectrometers can pick up something in that range. So, so we'll be looking for it. Are you close to being able to gather data now in a way that's effective with your UAPX system? Yeah, we should be collecting effective data. Yeah. So this might be soon the moment when citizen science does prove what government previously has hoped would be unprovable. Oh, that's true. Well, we're academic scientists, scientists, but, but citizen scientists can do the same thing. Absolutely. Yeah. What would you like to do? Like what's your dream to investigate? Oh. If you were given unlimited resources, what's the, what's the quest, the holy grail of UAP science? Well, I mean, if I, if I could have anything to do with any of these, if I can investigate any of these, I would love to see what one of these craft actually looks like. I'd love to be on site on one.

40:47 I'd love to be inside one of these and see what they look like. What does the technology look like? Yeah. So, scientists, frankly, are bigger gossips than journalists. One of the, one of the problems I have with the whole idea of a crash retrieval reverse engineering program is, and Eric Weinstein says this a lot as well, if there were physicists, reputable physicists working in this field, surely everybody would know about it. Wouldn't that be true? Wouldn't that be case? That's, that's not true. I mean, most of the, the scientists who work on these things have usually signed NDAs, rather strict NDAs and, um, and they don't talk publicly. Have you spoken to them? Some of them do talk privately and that does happen. Have you spoken to some? I have talked to some of them and, and I have learned a bit about these craft, yes. And do you believe there are craft that have been retrieved by the United States? It appears that that's probably true, is what it seems like. Yes. Have you spoken, as I have, to people who are working in this alleged program, the legacy program?

41:48 Um, or have worked. Yes. It's interesting, isn't it? Because one of the commonest arguments is that if this was real, it would have leaked. Right. But it has. So then, so then that implies it might be real. Right. That's what you would. Sure. One of the things that fascinates me about these objects is they are transmedium on occasion. Uh, explain that to me physically. I mean, does that mean that something like the Tic Tac, if it's operating using, say, the Alcubio drive and manipulating space time, does that mean that it can go through any hard physical object, be it water or a mountain? Or a mountainside? That's a good question. The, um, when transmedium was for the transmedium properties were first described. It was usually in the context of going from air to water or water to air.

42:49 And, um, and those are clearly not going to be human craft. I mean, our, you know, the transmedium objects we have are something like a, you know, seaplane. A seaplane is neither a good plane nor a good boat. So we were not good. We can't, we can't make something that can do both well. Right. Yeah. I mean, there are still drones, which can now go from water to air. So now drones can do things like that. But yeah, that's true. And, um, but these things have been observed for hundreds of years. If you go back to like Richard Dolan has a book that's that, um, talks about the history of these and ships records. And these go back 250 years. So, um, but, but now back to transmedium. So it's not clear what these things can and can't do. I mean, if you can barrel through the atmosphere at 40,000 miles an hour without a sonic boom, even, um, it's almost as if you're not interacting with the air. Right.

43:49 And in fact, I know of a case where I actually have the sonar data for a case, an underwater case where you've got a, a craft that was measured to be 800 feet long, 30% longer than the, um, typhoon class submarines, Russian typhoon class submarines, and, um, 150 feet wide. Oh, wow. That was behind a New Zealand frigate, a Navy frigate. Oh, you have to get data. I actually have that sonar data. I'm learning how to analyze sonar data right now. I've spoken to somebody who was on board that visit. Oh, right, right. And this, this object was following the ship and was 2.5 kilometers behind the ship and actually closed that distance in 25 seconds, passed under the ship and drained it of all its power. Now, um, so you can calculate the, the top speed. You're looking at something like 3,000 miles an hour underwater. Underwater. So you have to clear, I mean, this is the physics in me, physicists to me thinking you've got to, you've got a 150 foot diameter

44:52 cylinder, 2.5 kilometers long that you have to get out of the way. So how could you possibly do that? In, in, in 25 seconds. So water is not compressible. You can't just push it out of the way. You have to lift it up. Right? So you can actually calculate how much energy that would take to lift up in 25 seconds, which there was no observed wave or detected wave in the ship. So, so it, so it, it's as if the craft was not interacting with the water. Yet, the sonar worked. And sonar works by water molecules banging on something. So the sonar suggests the craft is interacting with the water. The behavior of the craft suggests it's not interacting with water. And it's really hard in that situation to put together a physics picture of what's going on. So I, this is interesting because I mean, one of the things I often hear from people, I've spoken to pilots who've described chasing an object and it just goes into a hill. Right. How could you do that?

45:52 So if you're, if you can fly through the air and not interact with the air and fly through water and not interact with water. And, and I have actually asked, asked people a question, have you ever observed going through solids? They, what makes water different than solid? There's not that much difference. Um, most of matter is empty space anyway. Sure. Um, so the same thing that makes it hard to move through water is what makes it hard to move through solids. So they ought to be able to go through land as well. So just explain the whole idea of the Alcubia drive to me, which is this Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubia who came up with this idea that if you can essentially squeeze space time in front of the object, it's falling into that space. Right. But even if that's the case, whether it be water or land, physical land, surely there's going to be massive displacement. Right. Yeah. I don't think anybody has a good idea. I mean, we've known, so Alcubia came up with his concept for a warp bubble, right?

46:53 Like in the early nineties, maybe 94 or something like this. But I don't think anybody is, I haven't seen anyone do the calculations for a similar warp, that kind of warp bubble or a similar one in air or in a medium. Sure. I don't think those calculations would be hard to do and it would be hard to figure out what happens to the medium. But I don't think anybody has actually done those calculations. So I don't think anyone knows how a warp bubble would interact with another medium. So inside your university, I can imagine early on, there must have been a lot of stigma associated with taking UFOs seriously. I was worried about that when I started and I decided to, if I'm going to trot, look into this, I'm just going to be open about it. I usually feel that's the best way to go. Just confront it head on. And so I had a lecture on UFOs. I gave a lecture on UFOs to our physics department, which then leaked into several other departments.

47:53 So the room was packed full, way above the fire safety number. People were sitting cross-legged on the floor up to where I was standing. Oh, cool. It was that full. How many years ago was this? This would have been in about, this would have been in like 2015, 2016. It was wakeful. I love it. So it was, it was only a year or two before the New York Times article on ATIP. And in which it was that, that, that type of excite, that sign of excitement and the fact that, you know, the New York Times article made me think I should really study this scientifically. That's what really compelled me to do this. And I, and I remember giving that talk and, and, and at the end of that talk, several of my colleagues, you know, came up to me and said, this is really fascinating. You know, they were, they were actually fascinated by it, which I found, which I was really excited by. And, and after that point in time, they'd

48:54 been very supportive. So the university management has been supportive. Yeah. So my department, my colleagues have been The department's been supportive. The university administration has been And in fact, in the last year, I've gotten two awards related to my study of UAP. So I got a, a presidential award for my creativity and research, which I think you would be as fond of that, definitely. And I, and I got an award from our college, from our Dean for, for public outreach. And are you finding that there are young students now who are choosing to research UAPs? The students, many students are interested in this. We've had a few undergraduates working with us. It's, I think for us still, that's, especially as mentors, that's a difficult balance to strike because you're, you know, we're obligated and devoted to helping the students build up their career. But we don't want to get them stigmatized

49:54 early on in their career so that they have trouble later on. So, so it's a, it's a difficult balance. So, you know, we'll have, okay, you can work on this UFO project with us, but you need to do this too. Yeah. And, and, and we try to find, Matthew Shadagas and I are trying to find ways to handle. But there's support and interest in research. There's a lot of support and interest. We've come a long way, haven't we? In 70 of 80 years of stigma. It's, it's, it's shocking. Yeah. And especially in the last 10 years. And I'm very, um, I'm very hopeful because I've felt when I first got into this, I felt if we can get scientists interested in this and involved, then we won't be able to stop it. We will actually figure this out. Um, because scientists are very, usually very, especially young scientists are usually very hungry for a cool project to work on. Right. We're trying to do something interesting and, and, and important. And this really falls into that category. Coming back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of this interview, the

50:55 idea that some phenomena defy explanation. Right. Is it possible that we may never get an answer? I mean, one of the things I've noticed is some people even say that the phenomena appears sometimes to try and even evade detectors. Right. That's true. Like it's operating intelligently. It's deactivating. Well, that's part of the problem with when you're studying something. In physics, we're usually studying something that's not intelligent. Right. Sure. Intelligent things are hard to study because they're very, they're very unpredictable. I mean, I, this is about a cubic meter of mass and you can't predict what this cubic meter of mass is going to do in the next 10 seconds. I don't care how much you know about the loss of physics, you know that I was going to do this. Right. Nobody predicted that. So it's very unpredictable. And when you're dealing with intelligence, it's very difficult. And I think this is, it's a new area of study and we're going to face some challenges with it. And I don't think it will be completely

51:57 understandable, but I, but you'd never know until you try at least. So you're on the UAP Science Advisory Council with Professor Avi Loeb. I caught up with Avi a couple of weeks ago in Washington at the News Nation offices. And he was very excited about getting his teeth into some of the research. What are you doing? Like, what will you be doing to try and investigate? Well, our job there is to, to look at data provided by the US government on UAP data and to study it scientifically. And to then make a scientific assessment that we can then use to advise the president, FBI, ODNI and other agencies. Now in the past, and I mean, no disrespect to you, Kevin, your reputation precedes you. In the past scientists have been manipulated by the defense department and the intelligence community. You're a noble guy. If you see that happening, what will you do?

52:58 If we see that we're being manipulated, I don't want to be part of that. Yeah. Because we could see another Condon report or another manipulation like we saw with Project Blue Book with the early days of Alan Hynek being told how his reports would end up. Right. There is that risk, isn't there? There is that risk. Yeah. Are you going to get a security clearance? Like, will you be able to look at classified material? No. We, they, we were told expressly that we'll only see material that's unclassified. So you're only going to be given what they give you. Yes. Which is immediately, I mean, no disrespect, but immediately that's a bit of a gag on your ability. Exactly. Yeah. We, we, yeah, there, we have no illusions, no delusions about what's going to be happening here. We know that we're beginning going to be given data and that, that data is probably not what we're hoping for. But I think that what, especially me and Matthew are, are hopeful for is that just

53:59 like, just like with the Nimitz case where we were able to figure out some things about the accelerations of these objects from that data. And my guess is nobody expected that to happen, but they hope that wouldn't happen. My expectation here is that something will get released, that we'll be able to figure out something. And that's what I'm hoping for. Somewhere though, deep in the recesses of some government agency or probably in private aerospace, somebody is pulling the levers, aren't they? They're deciding. Somewhere is, yes. Some group of people or somebody is deciding, yeah. One thing that we all see in the pursue releases from the presidential directive is we see redacted files. Right. At the very least, will you be allowed to be briefed on the unredacted data inside some of those videos? That is, that's a request that we made, yes. So that would be, that would be great if we could, yes. Because, I mean, as with, say, the go-fast,

55:00 how can you, or the tic-tac, how can you decide the velocity of an object unless you've got radar data, movement from point A to point B? You need to be able to estimate its size somehow, yeah. Sure. Yeah, well, I mean, this is, this is a point we've made recently in our requests, and that is we can't act as an advisory council if we don't have anything to advise on. So we have to be given something to advise on. Is it your hope that UAPX's sensor systems and capacity to collaborate, would you work with Arrow? Would we work, well, we would work with Arrow in that we would share data with them, but we were willing to share data with anybody because we're a scientific operation and that's what scientists do. But there's always the risk, I guess, that if you start doing collaborations with the defence department, they're going to try and novel your data. Oh yeah, we would, yeah, so we wouldn't have a collaboration like this. Sure. If they wanted to see some of our data, we

56:01 would share it with them, but that would probably be it, yeah. We wouldn't, we wouldn't have a collaborative operation. To some extent, though, the answer is potentially staring us in the face because if there are craft, I mean, you've said the Holy Grail for you would be to see a craft. Right. Officially, Arrow has stated there is no evidence of extraterrestrial technology that's been recovered by the US government, but we all know it's nonsense. At this point, yeah, it appears to be nonsense, yeah. Somewhere out there, there are people who know where those craft are. Mm-hmm. Would it be part of your brief as the UAP Science Advisory Council to demand to go to those locations and see if what's there is what you've been told has been there? We can ask, and we have asked, and so far no. So they've said well, yeah. So far they've said no, and that's that, yeah. Because there's a silly little game being played at the moment, isn't there?

57:01 At the moment with the Pursue releases, the four tranches of UFO files, at best the public is being presented with what Project Blue Book and Project Condon all based their findings on, which is there is a mystery. Yeah. There is something there that needs investigation. Right. But the reality is we strongly suspect the United States or sections of the United States government know the answers already, don't we? There is that suspicion, but I'm not always sure how much they actually know. It's interesting. And I suspect that's possibly part of the problem and part of the disclosure problem is that there is likely so much that's not known that if you disclose a little bit, they won't be able to answer the next questions, right? Sure. And that puts them in a very awkward position. And I think that's very possibly one of the concerns. Well, if you're a $1.1 trillion budget per

58:02 year defence agency, the last thing you want to admit is that you can't quite explain what the intentions are of the beings that are operating these craft, if that's what they are. That's right. And if you haven't ever really seriously studied them, then you would be in that position. Well, I can say, Professor Kevin Knuth, we're all backing you to the hilt in the hope that you do get to that Holy Grail and find that flying saucer on a hill somewhere. Thank you so much for joining Reality Check. It's great to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. And we look forward to getting you back when the UAP Science Advisory Council's got something exciting to announce. That would be great. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. And if you'd like to ask us questions at Reality Check, you can send your questions to realitycheck@newsnationnow. You can also listen to this show on all good audio platforms, including Audible and Spotify, because too much Reality Check is barely enough.